“Both Besson and young Dryer were notoriously fast drivers. Very well, Doctor Satan contrived a method of generating and storing static electricity in enormous amounts. Probably the generating was done by the wheels themselves, turning at fast speeds. The electricity was stored in some small device that wouldn’t be noticed if examination was made of the car before it was taken out. When a voltage was built up that would be far beyond any amount that could be registered on any recording instruments yet devised, it exploded the storage device and utterly consumed the car and occupants and everything else. That is the only thing that would explain the violet light told of by the witnesses. In a way, a natural death. But in a gruesome, fearful, spectacular death which was so horrifying and would cow other motor manufacturers that they would give Doctor Satan anything he asked rather than risk the same fate themselves.”
“Horrifying and fearful enough,” breathed Beatrice with a shiver. “Ascott—you have escaped the other deaths this fiend has invented. Can you escape this? For of course he will turn the new weapon on you, too. More than anything else on earth, he wants to get rid of you. He’ll try to kill you as soon as he learns you are here.”
Keane laughed a little, without humor. “As soon as he knows I’m here? My dear, you underestimate him. As surely as we live and breathe he knows that now!”
* * * *
At twenty minutes past noon a man in the dungarees of the Union Airlines mechanics turned off a sidewalk into the yard of a factory. It was a small factory, two stories high, less than an eighth of a block square. Its windows were boarded up. The yard was grown with weeds.
A man sat in the open doorway of the deserted-looking building. He was an elderly man, poorly dressed. His faded blue eyes stared straight ahead with curious blankness. His face was stubbled with three days growth of beard.
The man in the dungarees came up to the doorway. A small, monkey-like fellow with a mat of hair over his face through which peered small, cruel eyes, he hopped as he walked in an oddly animal way.
“Is anyone in?” he asked the watchman.
The watchman’s faded blue eyes did not move. They continued to look straight ahead, as he sat there like a statue. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“How many?” asked the man in dungarees.
“Two, sir.” The watchman’s lips moved like mechanical things. He looked and acted like something actuated with springs and wires.
The little man in dungarees shivered a bit. His pale eyes narrowed with an emotion that might have been fear. He walked past the watchman, who did not move a muscle, and into the factory building.
It was dark in here in spite of the noon daylight outside. The reason was that the entire inside of the first floor was draped closely in heavy black fabric, which also stretched from a frame crossing in front of the door, so that the door could be open innocently and yet outside eyes could not see in and detect the black drapes.
The little man passed under the door drape. He entered the dark interior, which was dimly lit by red electric bulbs so that it resembled a corner of some weird inferno.
Over a bench on which was a glistening small receptacle about a third the size of a cigar box, a figure bent which was like something seen in a fanciful illustration of hell: a tall, gaunt figure draped from head to heels in a red robe, with red gloves shielding the hands, and a red mask of the figure, red had been draped, a skullcap, from which protruded two Luciferian horns in imitation of the horns of the Devil.
Next to this eerie figure was the body of a legless man gigantic torso supported by calloused, powerful hands.
“Girse,” said the imperious, red-draped figure, without turning its head.
The little man in dungarees drew a quick breath. The red figure had its back toward him. It could not have heard his soft entrance. Yet, as though it had been facing him, that entry had been noted.
“Yes, Doctor Satan,” he said.
“Report, please.”
Girse hopped closer in his monkey-like fashion, and stood next to Bostiff, the legless giant. From under the voluminous dungarees he drew a flat leather case.
“Miller, the truck manufacturer, did as you ordered,” he said docilely to Doctor Satan. “Here are thirty cheeks, of one hundred thousand dollars apiece.”
Doctor Satan’s coal-black eyes glowed from the eyeholes of the red mask. In them was glacial triumph.
“It is well. You got into the Union Airlines hangar?”
“I did,” said Girse, his pale eyes glinting.
“You attached the storage cube?”
“I did, with the wire leading to he propeller, and with fins attached to the propeller blades.”
Unholy satisfaction glittered in the coal-black eyes. Then it was dimmed, and the light of rage glowed there.
“It will be as we wish it unless Keane discovers it in time.”
“Keane is here?” quavered Girse.
Bostiff spat out an oath, his dull eyes red with fury.
“He is here,” replied Doctor Satan. “I gleaned that from the mind of Corey. He is here, in Detroit. And Corey has seen him and was advised not to meet my demands. That was foreseen—which is why you attached the storage cube to the propeller. He is in a tower suite at the Book Hotel, with his secretary Beatrice Dale. And he is daring to match his wits against mine once more.”
Icy murder flared in the coal-black eyes. The red-gloved hands closed slowly, quiveringly.
“This time, Ascott Keane dies! This time, I will get rid of the one obstacle between me and unlimited power, through fear, over the minds of men.”
He turned back to the bench, with his red-gloved fingers delicately adjusting tiny, fine plates of some substance like mica which packed the interior of the small metal container on which he was working—a container like that which had been attached to the sedan of Besson and the roadster of young Tom Dryer.
“With Keane out of the way,” he was saying, “I could be supreme on earth—and I will be!”
CHAPTER IV
The Voice of Satan
The late evening papers gave the news of Doctor Satan’s latest blow against the ancient law: Thou shalt not kill. Beatrice Dale brought the paper in to Keane. He was about to go out, and she handed it to him without a word.
Keane read the account, then crumpled the paper in a grim hand.
“COREY DIES IN UNIQUE PLANE ACCIDENT,” the item was headed. And across half the front page was spread the account:
This afternoon, at four o’clock, Mr. H. C. Corey, president of Universal Motors, was killed in an airplane accident twenty miles out of the Detroit landing field.
Mr. Corey, called on urgent business to New York City, chartered the plane for himself alone and took off at three-forty. The plane circled the field once, then headed east. Twenty miles from the field, it exploded.
Union Airline officials have no explanation to make. The explosion, according to eye-witnesses, was accompanied by a violet flame, which is not the type of flame resulting from gasoline explosions…
Keane drew a deep breath. “Called on urgent business to New York City,” he quoted. “The fool! He committed suicide. Doctor Satan gave orders. I told him not to ride in anything capable of speed.”
He went toward the door. “I’m going to Besson’s home,” he said to Beatrice. “I want to talk with Besson’s chauffeur about the sedan the man was killed in. I’ll be back in an hour.”
* * * *
Carlisle, Besson’s chauffeur, bit his lips as he faced Keane in the cool dimness of the great garage.
”I suppose I should have gone to the police about it,” he was saying unsteadily. “But I couldn’t see what good that would do then, and I knew I’d get in a lot of trouble over it.”
“You’re sure it was Besson?”
“No, later I realized I couldn’t be sure,” Carlisle admitted. “I he
ard his voice, and I’ll swear it was his voice. And I saw his back, and he was wearing a checked suit as he usually does. But I’ll have to confess I didn’t see his face.”
“Girse,” murmured Keane. “Made up as Besson with Satan himself speaking in Besson’s voice from a distance.”
“What?” said Carlisle.
“Nothing, go on.”
“That’s about all. The man I thought was Mr. Besson went out, with a bag and everything as if on the Cleveland trip, and then came back in about half an hour. I didn’t see him return—I only heard the car drive in and went down and found the sedan. The first I knew something was wrong was when Besson called, half an hour later, asking if the sedan was ready for his trip. I though he’d gone crazy, then.”
“You have no idea where the sedan was driven in that half-hour?” said Keane.
“None at all,” said Carlisle. “And now, of course, no one will ever know. Because there isn’t any sedan to look over any more.”
Keane’s lips compressed. “There’s no sedan, but I think we can find out where it went in that fatal half-hour. Have you cleaned out in here recently?”
Carlisle looked at the floor of the garage and shook his head. “We haven’t kept up quite the schedule we usually do since the boss died. The garage floor hasn’t been swept…”
“Good,” said Keane. “Where did the sedan stand in here?”
Carlisle indicated the space nearest the end wall. Keane went there, bending low, critically examining the concrete. “The man drove it back into this spot before Besson took it out?”
Carlisle nodded. Keane got to his knees. There were slight flakes of dust and dirt from a car’s tires on the floor. Keane took up some of these and put them carefully about an envelope. He turned to go.
“Shall I tell the cops about this?” said Carlisle, white-faced.
Keane shook his head. “It would get you in a lot of trouble, as you said. And I don’t think it would do any good. You can’t be blamed for being fooled by a man who killed your employer.”
He went out, with the chauffeur’s thankful and admiring gaze following him.
At the curb before the Besson home was the coupe Keane had hired to get about the city in. He got in behind the wheel and headed for the near-downtown section.
He was on his way to the laboratory of a friend of his. In New York he had his own laboratory, vastly better than the one owned by his friend. But he hadn’t time to send to New York and he thought the friend’s equipment would be sufficient enough to perform the task he wanted.
As a man will do sometimes, Keane broke his own strict rule disregarding the very warning he had given Corey: not to ride in anything capable of speed.
In a hurry to get the scrapings of the sedan’s tires analyzed, he drove like a black comet along the boulevards drove that way till suddenly his hair began to feel as though it were standing on end and every nerve in his body tingled and rasped with exasperating sensitivity.
His face paled a little then. With his lips drawn back to show his set teeth, he jammed down the brakes of the car.
“Static electricity!” he whispered to himself. “The devil! Does he think he can get me that way?”
He opened the hood of the car. Attached to the underside of the dash was a metal container. From it led a fine wire. The wire went to the fan whirling at the front of the motor. And to the fan-blades fine fins of some flexible, colorless stuff had been attached.
With a savage jerk, Keane ripped the wire loose from the metal box. But the box itself he detached carefully to take home to study further. He knew that the secret of the violet explosions lay in that box; a secret consisting in what possible manner of substance could act as a storage battery for static electricity and store the stuff till an explosion point was reached.
* * * *
With Doctor Satan frustrated and his life no longer in danger, Keane went on his way to his friend’s laboratory and presented the tire scrapings for analysis.
“Mixed in with the normal dirt of the streets,” the friend reported a little later, “there are two substances which might tell you where the car has been. One is a trace of cinders, such as is to be found in many factory yards. The other is a powdered chemical which turns out to be a special kind of lime fertilizer.”
“So?” said Keane.
“So this,” replied the man. “There is only one plant in Detroit which manufactures that particular type of lime fertilizer. That is a plant out on Jefferson Avenue.” He gave the address. “It is at least possible that Besson’s sedan was driven near the plant during its half-hour absence and picked up a little of the fertilizer, spilled on the street from trucking.”
“And the trace of cinders?”
The man shrugged. “That particular company does not have cinder surfaces in its yards. I telephoned to find out. They must have come from somewhere else.”
Keane thanked him and went out. His light gray eyes were glittering, his firm mouth was a bleak slit in his face. Cinders, and dust of a fertilizer made in only one spot in the city! He thought that should provide a trail to the spot in Detroit where Doctor Satan lurked like a human spider spinning new and ever more ghastly webs.
He went to the Book Hotel, to study the shining metal container he’d got from his dash, and try to penetrate its secret, before making the next and last move that should bring him face-to-face with Doctor Satan himself.
* * * *
At the hotel desk, he told the clerk to ring Miss Dale’s room and ask her to come to his suite with notebook and pencil. His phone was ringing when he opened his door.
“Miss Dale is not in her room, sir,” the clerk reported.
Keane’s eyebrows went up. Then they drew down into heavy, straight black lines over his light gray eyes as apprehension began to gnaw at his brain.
He went to the room in the tower suite which he had set aside to use as office and workroom. “Beatrice,” he called, looking around for the quietly beautiful girl who was more right hand to him than mere secretary.
The room was empty. So were the other rooms. With the apprehension mounting to chill certainty in his mind, Keane looked around. He found his hands clenching and sweat standing out on them as his quick imagination grasped the significance of her absence.
An exclamation burst from his lips. Half under the desk in his temporary office he saw a glove. It was a tan glove of the type he had seen Beatrice wear last. Just the one glove.
Near the door, now, he saw the other.
“My God!” he whispered.
Beatrice had gone out of the hotel. That was a certainty. But—she never went out ungloved. It was one of her fastidious habits. Yet there were the gloves she wore with the brown street costume she’d had on when Keane left here.
His head bent swiftly, and a terrible fear leaped into his eyes. A voice had sounded.
“Ascott Keane,” it said—and it was hard to tell whether it was an actual voice or a thought making itself articulate in his own brain. “You escaped the death waiting for you under the hood of your coupe. You shall face death later at my hands, in spite of that. But before death comes for you, you shall have the pleasure of imagining, as you are doubtless doing now, the lingering fate that shall be dealt out to your able assistant, Beatrice Dale. I have her, Keane. And when you see her, if you ever do, I’m afraid you’ll be unable to recognize her.”
There was a low, icy laugh, and the voice ceased.
“My God!” breathed Keane again.
And then he was racing from the room, with agony in his heart but keeping the agony carefully walled off from the cold and rapid efficiency with which his keen mind could work in times of great emergency.
“There is only one plant in Detroit which manufactures that particular type of lime fertilizer,” his laboratory friend had said. “That is a plant out on Jefferson Avenue…”
Keane got into his coupe, wrenched the wheel around, and pressed the accelerator to the floorboard as he sped out to Jefferson Avenue.
CHAPTER V
Living Death
Keane went straight to the plant from near which the tires of Besson’s sedan had picked up the significant trace of fertilizer. There he paused a moment outside the high wire fence enclosing the company’s grounds. But he hesitated only a moment. There were no cinders in that yard, as the laboratory man had said. And the sedan had been some place where cinders had paved a space. Also the company grounds were swarming with workmen. No one could have driven a car in, tampered with it, and driven away again unnoticed.
He started on away from the plant, and farther away from the center of town. There was only the one direction to go in. The sedan, to have picked up the cinder trace, would have to go beyond this point.
He drove very slowly, examining intently the properties on each side of the street. But it was only with an effort that he kept himself from driving like mad, senselessly, aimlessly, so long as he covered a lot of ground in a hurry.
Beatrice…
Never had he had such urge for speed—but speed did no good when he didn’t know where he was going.
Beatrice…
“I have her, Keane. And when you next see her, if you ever do, I’m afraid you will be unable to recognize her.”
That was what Doctor Satan had said. Where in God’s name was she? And what was Satan planning to do to her?
He bit his lips, and kept the coupe down to a speed at which he could scan the buildings as he passed. And he then started a little, and lowered his head rapidly and drove by the place that had attracted his attention. The place was perfectly innocent-looking. It was a small factory less than fifty yards from the sidewalk on the left-hand side. But two things had riveted his attention.
The first was that the grounds around the factory were cinder-paved. The second was that the place was abandoned, with boarded-up windows and an air of desolation.
An abandoned factory, in a not-too-populous part of the city…
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